1 May 2006

Dear Friend of TAG:

I'm excited to send you TAG's 2005 Annual Report and to share with you our goals for 2006.

As you know, Treatment Action Group (TAG) works with scientists and activists worldwide to focus research efforts on the most promising avenues. Not only an activist watchdog, TAG is a catalyst for innovative research on understudied research areas. TAG has sped up research on pioneering treatment strategies including intermittent therapy, understanding the immunology of HIV non-progressors, and research on serious co-infections such as tuberculosis (TB) and hepatitis C virus (HCV).

This year, TAG is expanding our activism to accelerate AIDS research, broaden treatment access, and fight against unwise policies which undermine the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS.

We depend on your generosity to support our work, which is more vital than ever in this hostile political climate. Great scientific opportunities are opening up for better prevention, treatment, and management of HIV/AIDS.

At the same time, AIDS research is under attack. TAG needs your help to defend and expand AIDS research.

• For the first time since 1970, the President's proposed budget for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) represents an actual decrease from the previous year. Not only AIDS research, but all biomedical and behavioral research is threatened by budget cuts.
• Since TAG was founded in 1992, we have fought each and every year, for increases not only in the NIH AIDS research budget, but for increased NIH funding overall. This year, we will work with our allies in Washington, DC, and around the country to let Congress and the Administration know that the American people support more, not less research on life-threatening diseases, including HIV/AIDS.

We need your support more than ever to strengthen AIDS research, protect it from political attack, and provide treatment and information to people living with HIV/AIDS. TAG has aggressive activism plans for 2006.

This summer, TAG will publish our annual updated report, What's In the Pipeline: New Drugs and Vaccines for HIV, Tuberculosis, and Hepatitis C Virus (HCV). The research pipeline is full of new drugs and even some vaccines for these three diseases, which together create a deadly combination for people living with HIV. But greater support is needed if the promise these new drugs and vaccines hold is to be realized.

Strong watchdog organizations such as TAG are needed to ensure that the 20 new anti-HIV drugs which are currently in clinical trials are studied not only quickly, but also comprehensively, in all affected populations – men and women, children, people with liver disease, present and former drug users, and those with HCV or TB co-infections. Some of these drugs represent new classes of treatment which offer the potential to revolutionize HIV therapy and give people living with HIV/AIDS more options and longer, healthier lives. TAG's activist oversight ensures that people living with HIV have the necessary information to use these new treatments safely and effectively, and to educate communities and people living with HIV/AIDS about their use. You can find out more about TAG's work on our website at www.treatmentactiongroup.org.

Later in 2006, the first truly promising HIV vaccine will go into large-scale clinical efficacy trials around the world. TAG is a key community watchdog to ensure that these vaccine trials will meet the highest ethical and scientific standards.

TAG fights to speed up HCV and TB research. New therapies are also being tested which hold the potential for better, safer treatment of HCV, which infects one quarter of Americans living with HIV. And, for the first time in 40 years, promising new drugs are going into clinical trials for the treatment of TB, a worldwide killer of people with HIV.

TAG pushes for more research funding. The cost of studying all of these new drugs and vaccines runs into the many millions. Yet without greater public funding for this research and community oversight of clinical trials, many of these interventions will take years longer to study, wasting time, energy, and lives.

TAG will mobilize public and private resources to speed up research on these treatments and vaccines, while ensuring that they meet the highest ethical and scientific standards, and after approval, are available and accessible to those who need them most.

TAG is working with our allies in the AIDS community, in Congress, and around the country to ensure that no one who needs life-saving treatment for their HIV, TB, or HCV goes without.

To do our work, we have to take on powerful institutions, such as the Administration, Congress, and the drug companies.

TAG has a staff of six and a budget of just over one million dollars. Our survival and growth over the past 14 years are due to the strong and unremitting support of donors like you, who have sustained us through the ups and downs of AIDS treatment activism.

Now I am writing to ask you to renew and increase your support for TAG's work. No other organization in the world does what we do as well as we do it.

We are lean and efficient, focused and effective.

I'm proud to include with this letter TAG's 2005 Annual Report, which highlights our achievements over the last year to strengthen and sustain AIDS research. This year, we must do even better – but we need your help.

We are living in times of great scientific promise, but face enormous political obstacles. TAG is focused on making lives healthier and longer for people living with HIV/AIDS. There is no quick fix. This is a long-term struggle and we need your long-term support.

Thank you for your generosity in the past, and please consider increasing your gift to TAG today, so that people with HIV can live longer and healthier lives tomorrow.

Yours truly,

Mark Harrington

Executive Director
Treatment Action Group